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Ivy gasped for air as her mind filled the body. She felt the body awaken fully, painfully, as her consciousness coursed through all the nerve endings of the animal shell. It hurt like the shock a swimmer feels when plunging into an icy lake. After her skin relaxed and she took her first breath, she’d be able to hear, and mere moments after that she’d be able to see.
To get her mind off the throbbing and tingling in her body, Ivy wondered how she’d gotten here, wherever here was. She’d been in Angus’s glorified garage-laboratory. She’d been using the body of his fat cat Sir Schnortle; now that she was no longer in the feline body, she was able to admit that he was fat.
That awful harpy of a girl, the other Ivy, had gotten upset. She’d struck herself. Her alter had struck her—Ivy—not knowing it was her of course—but still, she’d slapped a cat. And then what had happened? Ivy felt a slow smile coming on. That’s right. I bit her.
Ivy heard a steady mechanical beep-beep-beep close to her head. Then, she could see. Above her was grayness. She was lying on a firm surface. She turned her head to the side and saw a patient monitor. She lifted her head and saw white bed sheets covering a long body. She wiggled the body she found herself in. There were two arms and two legs. She examined the body. What kind of creature was she this time?
She gasped as she recognized a hand: five fingers, blue nail polish. She reached her hand to her face, met it with her other hand, felt two eyes, a nose, no fur. And higher. Spiky, short hair. A little lower. Ears. Holes in the lobes where earrings would fit. No fur. No claws. No feathers or wings. No scales or blow holes or tusks. A girl, simply a girl, wonderfully a girl.
“I’m back,” she breathed and bolted up out of the bed. Her happiness was short-lived as she surveyed the scene around her.
She was surrounded by hospital gurneys, at least twenty of them, each holding a sleeping child plugged into a monitor like hers. The gurneys were arranged in columns and rows, spreading out from hers in a grid pattern.
And then she was out of the bed, dragging the monitor machine behind her, racing from one gurney to the next, recognizing the girl who sat ahead of her in algebra, the boy who kicked her chair in programming class, her lab partner from materials science.
And there was Billy Roberts, Angus’s best friend in the gurney beside the door. She shook him by the shoulders, but he merely wobbled to and fro. “Hey,” she called. “Billy. Wake up!” He didn’t seem to have heard. She pinched his arm, hard, but there was no sign that he’d felt it.
She walked from gurney to gurney, checking this child and that, but the condition of all the bodies was the same. Breathing, hooked to tubes and wires, but not moving. All these children were in a coma. She began checking faces, pretending she wasn’t looking for anyone in particular but lying to herself. She knew she was looking for Angus, or actually Angus’s alter, AC3.0, as he was called here. After walking around the room three times and not finding him, she realized that he had avoided her classmates’ common fate.
Deep inside the dark place within her, she intuited that this situation, this calamity, had something to do with her. And that same intuition told her that AC3.0 had the answer. She had to get out of this hospital ward and return to her life as a girl, find AC, and catch up on all that had happened since she’d been away. She wrenched the tubes and wires from her body. Immediately, alarms and sirens began to ring.
A white biohazard suit burst into the room, and then another, until the gray room was seething with medical professionals. One of the suits grabbed her around the waist, hauled her back on to the gurney, and whisked her out of the room. The poking, prodding, and testing began almost immediately. Blood was drawn, knees were tapped, and lights were shined into her eyes. More blood was drawn, and everything started again from the beginning.
As Ivy began to wonder whether the doctors and nurses would leave any blood inside her body, Ivy heard an angry voice yelling from the corridor. “Where is she? Where is my daughter? Let me see her!”
“Mom! I’m in here!” called Ivy jumping out of the bed.
“Back into bed,” soothed a nurse.
A large-boned woman whose oblong face was largely overshadowed by a riotous mass of yellow frizzled curls burst into the room and shoved the nurse aside as though she were a life-sized rag doll. The nurse grunted as she slammed into the tray and both tray and nurse skidded across the floor.
“Sorry,” said the woman. “New bicep implants. Still getting used to them.” Then she threw her arms around the startled Ivy and squeezed.
“Ma’am! You can’t be in here. Especially not without a suit!” gasped the nurse.
“Mom,” said Ivy. “Too. Hard.”
Mrs. Calloway kissed Ivy all over her face and then released her. “My sweet, sweet girl. How are you feeling, darling?”
“Fine. A little tired.”
Mrs. Calloway placed a hand on Ivy’s forehead. “No fever.”
“Can you even feel my temperature? Did the techs upgrade the skin sensor component in your hand app yet?” asked Ivy.
Mrs. Calloway held her hand up so Ivy could see it. “They released a new finger upgrade last month. You’ve been asleep so long. You’ve missed so much.” She hugged Ivy again, and then held out her hands for Ivy to examine. “I have sensation in the fingertips now. Makes it so much easier to pick things up. They are expecting Manus 4.0 to be released later this year. That should have full 360o wrist motion and palm support.” She moved her wrist from side to side. “It will be nice to be able to swivel it again.”
The nurse grabbed Mrs. Calloway’s arm, “I’m sorry, Ma’am. You can’t be in here. We’re not sure if the patient is still contagious.”
Mrs. Calloway brushed the nurse off as if she were an annoying fly. She stroked Ivy’s cheek lovingly. She felt like she hadn’t seen her daughter in months. In fact, Ivy hadn’t seen her mother since she’d begun her body jumping travels across parallel worlds, but Mrs. Calloway didn’t know that. She had seen Ivy’s body on a screen on Tuesday, when she’d last visited the hospital to check on her unconscious daughter. She hadn’t been allowed in the same room with her ever since the other children began to show similar signs.
Ivy reached out and touched the wiry yellow bubble around Mrs. Calloway’s head. “Mom, what did you do to your hair?”
“I know. Isn’t it awful? I need a new scalp transplant. This one keeps crashing.” She hugged her daughter again. “I’m so glad you’re okay. I’ve been so worried!” Tears welled in her eyes.
“Can you take your scalp in for a reboot?” said Ivy, quickly changing the subject. The last thing she wanted was to see her mother cry.
Mrs. Calloway laughed wetly and wiped the tears away. “I did that last week. That’s how I ended up with this mess. Enough about my upgrades. I came to see you on the screen today, and you weren’t there. I thought you had ... nevermind.” She gulped away a sob.
“Ma’am, really. I must insist. You need to leave now.” Like a persistent terrier, the nurse had latched on to Mrs. Calloway’s arm again.
Mrs. Calloway said, “Ivy is my daughter. She’s been lying here in a coma in your hospital for nine months. You can’t expect me to leave the minute she wakes up!”
“The doctors aren’t done with their tests. They think she may still be contagious.”
Mrs. Calloway said firmly, “I’m not leaving my daughter’s bedside.”
She plunked her large frame alongside Ivy on the gurney, crossed her arms, and set her chin defiantly. To the nurse, the resemblance between the mother and daughter, not visible before, was suddenly uncanny.
“We’ll see about that,” said the nurse. She pinched a knob on her earlobe and began to speak. “Request assistance in Room 535. Patient Zero has an uninvited guest who refuses to leave.”
Mrs. Calloway turned her attention back to Ivy. “We have a few minutes before they try to throw me out.” She flexed her arm muscles. “I look forward to seeing what these new biceps can do.”
“Mom, what’s going on?” asked Ivy. “Why are all my friends ... ?”
“What? Catatonic?” Mrs. Calloway paused, unsure how much information she should give Ivy. She’d always been perfectly honest with her daughter; some, Ivy’s father for example, said too honest. Mrs. Calloway didn’t see the point of telling children falsehoods to “protect” them. In her opinion, the sooner children understood the truth about the world, the better for them and for the world.
Mrs. Calloway decided to be completely honest. “The doctors said you contracted a terrible coma-inducing virus that you unwittingly transmitted to the other children at your school. No other schools have been affected, but to prevent potential outbreaks every school in the state and hundreds in adjacent states have closed. People are wearing biohazard suits everywhere.”
Nine months ago, Ivy had unwisely tested a new potion on herself. The potion had caused her body and consciousness to separate from one another. While her body lay here in this hospital, her mind had been traveling from animal to animal, from world to world. She’d made only one draught of the potion. She hadn’t shared it with anyone. She had been an isolated incident. She certainly hadn’t been contagious.
“I can’t have caused it! I wasn’t sick. I couldn’t have been contagious,” said Ivy.
Mrs. Calloway gently stroked Ivy’s cheek. “My sweet girl. It’s okay. You’re well. You woke up. There’s no reason to think the other children won’t wake up also.”
But Ivy was not convinced they would. She didn’t know what had caused her mind to finally return to her body. Did the potion simply wear off after nine months? Or was there some other explanation? And what had happened to the other kids? This was unrelated to her potion; it had to be.
She needed to explain this to her mother. Whatever was causing the coma in her schoolmates was different from what had caused her to leave her body. “Mom, I have to tell you something,” she began.
Two large hospital orderlies wearing biohazard suits entered the room. The nurse’s face was obscured by her face mask, but her voice was contemptuous “Time to leave, Ma’am.”
Mrs. Calloway grinned at the suits and flexed her muscles, “Can it wait, darling? Time to break in some new equipment.”